Vedanta and Cosmopolitanism in

Contemporary Indian Poetry

Subhasis Chattopadhyay

illiam blake (17571827) burnt

into W B Yeats (18651939). A E
Housman (18591936) absorbed both
Blake and Yeats:
On the idle hill of summer,
Sleepy with the flow of streams,
Far I hear the steady drummer
Drumming like a noise in dreams
Far the calling bugles hollo,
High the screaming fife replies,
Gay the files of scarlet follow:
Woman bore me, I will rise.1

The dream-nature of all reality is important

to note. This is Vedanta. True poetry reaffirms
the truths of Vedanta from which arises cosmopolitanism. Neither the Cynics nor Martha
Nussbaum invented cosmopolitanism. This description of hills and vales abound in Yeatss2 and
Housmans poetry. Pride in being resilient is seen
in poems like Yeatss An Irish Airman foresees His
Death. And all three of them have burnt into
the poetry of Bashabi Bhattacharya ne Fraser.3
Frasers poetic imagery abounds in the wonders
of nature: hills, vales, starlit nights; all of course
leading to resilience. Frasers poetry affirms the
fact that description of nature in poetry is not
generally a commentary on nature but on the
human relationship of a person to nature:
I have known loneliness
When I walked down meandering roads
That hugged the rhododendron mountain
walls
Through evening mists in spring.

648

I have felt abandoned

I discovered pettiness in a gloating vaunting
Of the past that had been predatory4

The line When I walked down meandering

roads echoes Robert Louis Stevensons (1850
94) The Vagabond. Further glossing or annotation
of Frasers poems are not needed here and will
be done in a complete annotated edition of her
poems by this author. The glossing or annotation
proves her absorption of literary influences, which
she may herself not be aware of. A poet who does
not suffer the anxiety of influence of great poets
before her or him is not worth annotating.
In From Salisbury Crags,5 she weaves myths
as did Blake and Yeats before her.6 Housman too
wove myths into his poetry.
Mastery of imagery is essential for any poet.
Poets may have agendas to grind. But that is
strictly speaking, in the realm of the social
sciences. Caroline Spurgeons Shakespeares
Imagery, and What It Tells Us7 still remains unsurpassed in providing us with a methodology
for separating good poetry from bad. Bad poets
pretend to be abstract since they cannot construct or handle imagery. Fraser, like good poets
before her, is a master of imagery construction.
Her Suruchi for Guid Taste: A Menu Ye Cannae Beat8 is one of the most synaesthetic poems
this author ever read. The aroma of good IndianScottish food jumps out of the text and yet not at
the cost of imagery: Theres licht stappit samosas an cheese stappit nan (73). The nan imagery
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Vedanta and Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary Indian Poetry

is now cosmopolitan and is also an image of hospitality. Frasers poetic corpus should be analysed
for images, which establish her as a true cosmopolitan poet and a philosopherall poets are
philosopherswho makes imagery once again
worthy of study and hospitable in the sense
that Emmanuel Levinas defined hospitality in
his Entre Nous.9 She is not just an Indian poet
but a poet who can be connected with the great
English Victorian novelists. For examples, description of food is to be found in Vanity Fair:
A Novel without a Hero10and in all of Charles
Dickenss novels.11
It is crucial to see Fraser as a poet in continuity with great novelists and poets rather than
bracket her as a poet of colour or a diasporic
poet, and so on. Great novels are great poetry
too. Fraser is suffering the fate of Maya Angelou (19282104). Professional scholars who have
well-nigh destroyed literary studies are doing
doctorates on Fraser as a poet of colour. Angelou
is a great poet; it is incidental that she is a Black
American poet. Had Angelou and Fraser not
been Black and Indian poets respectively, then
too their poetry would stand the test of time.
But career academics will keep harping on their
ideologies and skin-colour just to spite Harold
Blooms (b. 1930) understanding of literature in
the latters The Western Canon: The Books and
School of the Ages.12 Bloom includes many Indian
books; one would know that if one bothered to
read him. It is avant-garde to hate Bloom. Fraser
in talks with this author declares herself sold on
the idea that all poetry is eventually political.
That is what happens when good poets have to
obsessively write scholarly tomes on other poets
for academic credibility.
The tradition of glossing poetry is now seen
to be a waste of time. The fashion is to critique
poetry. Therefore, it is worthwhile to gloss a few
words in Frasers poetry and both thus prove the
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need for glossing, which is an ancient Indian

tradition, as well as show how Fraser individualises tradition. I Have Known Loneliness echoes
T S Eliots poetry; loneliness is also a textual
register which puts her in continuum with Anglo-Saxon poetry, where loneliness is a recurrent
trope.13 Human experiences are universal and
that is why the Hindu scriptures keep speaking
of the essentially undifferentiated nature of the
human person. Were human experiences like the
oceanic feeling,14 not real; the late Saint Pope John
Paul II would not have studied and written extensively on the philosophy of the human person.15
See the lines from Frasers I am the Absolute: To
the Dancer in Rupsha from Her Mother:
I stand at the centre, resolute,
Unwilling to multiply or be divided
Except in your dreams of the Absolute.16

Notice how glossing one word leads to other

poems and notice too, the inherent Upanishadic
wisdom or Vedanta in her works. Frasers academic work has exposed her to Vedanta. One
suspects her path-breaking work on Rabindranath Tagore has willy-nilly turned her an advocate for Vedanta. In a private conversation with
this author she has shown admiration for the
Isha Upanishad. This is one of the shortest major
Upanishads, and in a certain sense, the essence of
the Bhagavadgita.
Tagore and through him, Fraser is more of a
monist than a liberal humanist. Works on her
poetic corpus fail to bring out the monist or
Advaita Vedantist in her. Existing scholarship
consigns her to a status of non-religious poet.
This author is of the opinion that she needs to
be seen as a religious poet too. Her poems, like
An Illusion17 simultaneously show on her the
influence of Henry Vaughans religious sensibility as we find in Vaughans The World, and
also in mystical union with the supreme godhead aka Brahman in the Upanishads. The title

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Prabuddha Bharata

of the poem itself indicates her understanding

of samsara as Vedanta sees it; it is how Raja Rao
(19082006) before her saw the world in his
own novels. Frasers biblical understanding of the
world is to be found in poems such as The Suffering Symbol of Humanity (245) and There
Will Be Time For Everything (29). This trope
of the Suffering Servant we encounter within Judaeo-Christian literature is also a recurrent trope
in her poetry. The trope of the Suffering Servant
is best elucidated in the Qumran Scrolls, which
were accidentally discovered during 194657 in
Palestine. It is important that we research Frasers religious zeitgeist and world view for two
reasons: none before has attempted it while it is
certainly there in her poems and more importantly, in spite of Frasers own Enlightenmentinformed scholarly writingsalso to be found
in her numerous interviews; she is very much a
product of Tagores Vedanta and her own schooling under Roman Catholic nuns. It is never easy
to silence the religious element in anyone, leave
alone a poet like Fraser. Satan (44) and The Saviour (45) are explicitly biblical and Christian in
their subjects and tonalities. Existing scholarship
on Fraser does nowhere mention her as a very religious poet, albeit without fanaticism.
It is wrongly assumed that the main mode
of poetics in English written by Indian-origin
writers is realist; anti-romantic and counterpoised against the likes of Emily Dickinson and
even Rabindranath Tagore.18 As it were, Tagore
is the last acceptable Romantic in Indian poetry.
These assumptions do more harm within Indian
letters since being a Romantic is not an easy task.
One suspects that the inability to carry on the
heritage of Romanticism in their own works
force many Indian poets and scholars to decry
Romanticism. It is also fashionable to poohpooh the idea that poetry is universal and essentially apolitical. The transcendence of poetry is

650

not permitted in intellectual discussions of poets

and their works. A K Ramanujan (192993),19
Kamala Das (19342009), and in Bengali, Sunil
Gangopadhyay (19342012) did great disservice
to Indian poetry and poetry at large by haranguing against the Romantics. Frasers poetry is generally seen as poetry produced from her singular
position as a Bengali woman writing, teaching,
and living in Scotland. Existing scholarship has
successfully but wrongly pigeonholed her as a diasporic20 writer engaged with political issues of
her own times. This article will revisit the politics
of poetics in Indian and Western academia. Also
it will establish that good poetry does not necessarily demand one to know of the poets socio-cultural milieu. This too is nothing new since 1929.21
So what is poetry? This is the question that
generations of English major students have to
first come to terms with. They are systematically fed William Wordsworths definition of
poetry.22 That is fine. Lawrence Ferlinghettis
(b. 1919) definition of poetry is more natural:
Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of
everyone. In other words, that is poetry which
is inscribed in our hearts; akin to what is known
within jurisprudence as natural justice or natural law. In other words, poetry is that which
one knows instinctively to be poetry. Like we
do not need to define the air that we breathe in
for the humdrum purpose of living; poetry is
that which quickens our hearts.23 Ramanujan
experimented with free verse and Kamala Das
had her feminist agenda to grind. And these too
are fine. But Dass poetry will not be remembered since it is more diatribe than literature.
She will of course be adulated in various studies
departments. But these latter are not literature
departments; they are social sciences departments and therefore her poetry like Sylvia Plaths
poetry will be recommended reading in area
studies where social scientists will nitpick their
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Vedanta and Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary Indian Poetry

writings for understanding social upheavals. In
short, their poetry is versified journalism and
not exactly, The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey
Chaucer (13431400) or Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth (17701850).
Every time one reads Ramanujan one only
remembers that rivers in South India regularly
flood and a few cattle die and float away each
year in those floods.24 And it is not faraway that
one will entirely forget Ramanujan, when Indian
writings in English are no longer taught.25 Walt
Whitman (181992), Robert Frost (18741963),
and much earlier, Kalidasa (c. 4th century ce),
are all poets not because they are only read by
American Studies scholars and Indologists respectively. They are poets because their words
once read become eternal graffiti in our hearts.
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomd
by Walt Whitman written in 1865, is poetry. If
anyone has doubt about it being poetry without
doing courses in American Studies, then that person will have to study lifelong to verify that Abhijnana-Shakuntalam of Kalidasa is poetry too!
Bashabi Fraser happens to be a Bengali woman
who has settled in Scotland and she has played
into the hands of academicians of all sorts and
has been slotted as a diasporic feminist writer.26
Fraser, in a personal communique to me, has this
to say of those who she thinks influenced her:
I do read and relate to Elizabeth Bishop, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Mary
Shelley,Fanny Burney, Elizabeth Gaskell, etc.
More recently, I like poets likeSylviaPlath,
Carol Anne Duffy, Debjani Chatterjee, Shanta
Acharya, Usha Kishore, Imtiaz Dharkar, Sharon Oates, Grace Nicols, Jackie Kay and others.
Women fiction writers like Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie, Azar Nafisi, Arundhati Roy,
Jhumpa Lahiri, Anita Desai, Ashapurna Devi,
and Mahasweta Devi are amongst those, whose
works move me.
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Her choice of writers or poets is exactly what

an English literature professor will come up with.
This obsession with conflating oneself with ones
poetry is dangerous and often, counterproductive. What Fraser does not realise is that she is a
poet worth our time because her poetry is part
of that eternal graffiti etched in all our hearts. It
has a Jungian collective effect on us.
In Life, Fraser struggles with major poets who
matter. We can see her grappling with T S Eliot
when she writes:
I have seen the storm in my teacup27 (Life)
And
The mist is amazing
It has Machiavellian finesse
Settling on windows of this
Speeding trains prowess28

And she struggles with Robert Browning,

W B Yeats, Shakespeare and John Keats in her
Why?29

There is a valley tucked away in mountains

Where I can guide your steps today
And what will happen when you wake again?30

And in An Ethereal Sleeping Beauty31 among

so many other poets she tries to overcome
Gerard Manley Hopkins (184489). And this
is the early Fraser.
Bashabi Fraser obsesses with Rabindranath
Tagore. If one were to be a Bengali litterateur,
this is inevitable. Either one keeps adulating
Tagore and fixates on him as Harold Bloom fixates on Shakespeare or, like the late Sunil Gangopadhyay, bad-mouth Tagore. Fraser belongs to
the first group and in her ecstasy about Tagore,
one suspects that she has forgotten that her genius lies not in editing learned tomes on Tagore
but honouring Tagore by writing poetry, which
is unique and not imitative of Tagore. Thankfully, she has been able to slowly work her way
through and out of Tagore and those English
poets who influenced Tagore:

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Prabuddha Bharata

32

The scaffolding is the backdrop

To the story of conservation
Facilitated by the muscle
Of dedicated energy
That roughens the sinews
And one labour leads to another
Fruit, building the perfect body
That prompts the applause
Of an approving population.32

Fraser has made a name for herself as a Tagore

scholar. In her article Rabindranath Tagores
Global Vision33 we see her sparkle as a Tagore
expert. She outdoes Ketaki Kushari Dyson (b.
1940). Fraser is less well known than Martha
Nussbaum (b. 1947) mentioned in the beginning
of this article, since she is honest. Nussbaum has
made her career by hiding her Jewishness and touting cosmopolitanism through her weak readings
of Rabindranath Tagores corpus. While Nussbaum deliberately forgets Tagores Vedanta, Fraser
nowhere in her Introduction to Rabindranath
Tagores Global Vision forgets that Tagore was a
product of his times and milieu. The Indian Renaissance, as Fraser puts it, was bookended by the
TagoresDwarakanath was part of its beginning
and Rabindranath, sort of closed the Indian Renaissance. And those times were deeply religious
as well as revolutionary. It is this intellectual honesty that sets Fraser apart from Nussbaums nontranscendental discourse about liberal humanism:
Tagore was an environmentalist, a social and
educational reformer, decades ahead of his
time. He went back to Indian tradition in Upanishadic interpretations and welcomed modern
scientific studies in a liberal education that wedded the past to the present, brought the East
and the West in an inter-dependent continuum
that was global in scope and vision. This is what
Tagore Studies opens up (162).
What Fraser can easily own up to; that is
Tagores religious roots, others within Tagore
scholarship simply cannot come to terms with.

652

Apart from Fraser, it seems to this author that the

true Tagore causes anxiety in most. They want to
rpress the religious Tagore. Fraser in her Introduction to the special issue of Literature Compass,
which contains her article, enacts the reversal of
the rpression of the religious, essentially Upanishadic Tagore. Rpression here indicates a political
act elaborated by Michel Foucault in his Madness
and Civilization.34 Igor Grbis essay in this special
issue of Literature Compass is very original and is
existentially true. But without Frasers intervention as the writer of the Introduction, this volume
would lose its value and be lost in the morass of
rapidly increasing Tagore scholarship worldwide.
The culture brigade which makes its business
discussing poetry will have their insightful moments reading Ragas and Reels. Here at last is the
political Fraser, and as we already know, Fraser
herself believes that poetry can only be political.
But looking at these lines from a non-political
aka ideological manner, the poem is about conserving a city, which needs conservation. Only
those who take examinations need to know and
proclaim that Robert Brownings Duke in his
My Last Duchess may have been a historical tyrant. Common sense tells us we are encountering
a male chauvinist in Brownings poem who has
most probably murdered his wife before launching into a beautiful oration. Similarly, it is redundant to know that Fraser is writing about a
Scottish city and a migrant labourer. Searching
for Bashabi Fraser on the Internet makes one
feel that she is either of these four: a woman
poet, a Bengali poet, a Scottish poet, or a highprofile academician. The former three roles crib
and cram Fraser within South Asian Studies literatureif such can be called literature! She is
Thomas Grays (171671) The Bard warning us
against dogmatism, fascism, and xenophobia.35
Who will not enjoy her wonderful poem
Tweedledum-Tweedledee?36 Sukumar Ray
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Vedanta and Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary Indian Poetry

(18871923) comes to mind. Just because she
has written a long poem From the Ganga to the
Tay37 where the Holy Ganges shelters meditating holy men (45) and the Scottish Tay gave refuge to hermits (46), it does not mean that Fraser
is Scottish, Bengali, or Indian. This long poem
indicates that Fraser is trying to reinvent the epic
form in English and she has so far done a good
job of it. Her epic is worth reading because Fraser
is experimenting with a form, which has no takers
today since there are no writers of Frasers calibre
in recent times. From the Ganga to the Tay is on
a par with Thomas Hardys (18401928) The Dynasts and Housmans A Shropshire Lad.
This author, as a postgraduate student, had
Indian writings in English as his special paper.
It is sad that the syllabus framers did not include
Bashabi Fraser as one of the set poets for study
then, nor even now. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (b.
1947) too does not mention her anywhere in his
magnum opus on Indian literature.38 The time has
come that we include Bashabi Fraser in our school
books along with Emily Dickinson (183086)
and Robert Frost. It does not need saying that she
should be taught also at the bachelors level and of
course, at the masters level in English literature
courses everywhere. How Amit Chaudhuri (b.
1962) and Jeet Thayil (b. 1959)39 missed including her in their literature anthologies flabbergasts
this author. Frasers Student Monk40should have
been included by Thayil since he is bipartisan in
matters of religion. For example, Chaudhuri and
Thayil not only miss Fraser but also another important poet. This may be because both Chaudhuri and Thayil are better as creative writers.
Further, critical work is best left to critics.
This author who has never written a line of
poetry himself, being bereft of originality, knows
that the job of a literary critic is never to philosophise, keep singing praises for those who
are already known, but to consciously connect
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different media with poets and novelists who

are geniuses. Here is another poet, whose poem
was sent electronically to the author, whose work
Chaudhuri and Thayil have both missed. Swami
Vivekananda and his master Sri Ramakrishna,
would be pleased with the following poem and
the Tamil movie Kabali (2016), which deals with
the annihilation of caste:
The Shadowed God
Large umbrella, small umbrella
One for God, one for priest
Uppity gentry clinging to umbrellas
Running, not from the sun
But from people
Shadowed by them
Lives or mere shadows?
Meek faceless followers
Voiceless slaves
Bound to the bodies of the holy
Necessary shadows
Yet feared shadows
O God, why create the sun,
If shadows were to be shunned?
Was it you?
Or these your priests?
I remain in the shadows
As one of them
Waiting for the sun to illumine.

This author is glad to have discovered the

poet Fraser and this other poet, who has requested anonymity for the moment. And this
author is glad to show that the main mode of
Indian poetry in English is Romantic and Vedantic. In fact, the main mode of all good poetry
is Vedantic. Shakespeares sonnets deal with the
transient nature of samsara expressed through
physical beauty. Therefore, Vedanta is the sine
qua non of true art.
Vedanta is the essence of Hinduism. The essence of Hinduism is that all religions lead to
God qua Brahman. All people are the same; differences are only apparent. And the Godhead
permeates everything and is everything. This is

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Prabuddha Bharata

neither religious nor moral relativism. As the

Hindu seers see reality, Vedanta asserts: Truth
is one; sages call it by various names. Vedanta is
the logical conclusion to all knowledge honestly
probed and acquired. 
P
Notes and References
1. A E Housman, A Shropshire Lad, 35.
2. See W B Yeats, The Stolen Child.
3. She was born in 1954 in Purulia, West Bengal and
acquired the surname Fraser through her marriage. She is known globally as Bashabi Fraser.
4. Isolated, Bashabi Fraser, Life (London: Diehard, 1997), 7.This book should be compulsory
reading in school syllabi. Especially poems like
A Tryst with Time (26). This poem will teach
adolescents the need to seek out allusions; to
admire rhythm and to supplement She Walks in
Beauty by Lord Byron (17881824).
5. See From Sal isbury Crags, Bashabi
Fraser,Ragas and Reels: Visual and Poetic Stories
of Migration and Diaspora: Poems (Edinburgh:
Luath, 2012), 53.
6. The ability to construct and negotiate myths is
the hallmark of a great poet. A poet who invents
totally new myths is a bad poet. Fraser, like
Blake and Yeats before her creates new myths.
This mythopoeic nature of Frasers poetry cannot be assessed here due to constraints of space.
7. See Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeares Imagery,
and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge
University, 1935).
8. See Ragas and Reels, 73.
9. See Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous, trans. Michael B Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York:
Columbia University, 2000).
10. See William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair:
A Novel without a Hero (London: Bradbury and
Evans, 1848).
11. There is no distinction between good poetry and
great novels. If a great novelists cannot be compared to a great poet, then the novelist will not
stand the test of time. For example, James Joyces
(18821941) novels are indeed poetry and not
merely poetical. Existing scholarship on Fraser
has not compared her poems and epic to novels.
This is a lacuna in Fraser scholarship which needs
to addressed, but is beyond the scope of this essay.

654

12. See Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The

Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994).A book which is no longer
part of English Literature syllabi in most places
in the world, yet a book which counters fads
like fat studies.
13. See The Seafarer and Wulf and Eadwacer.
14. See Romain Rollands letter to Sigmund Freud
dated 5 December 1927.
15. See Karol Wotjyla (later Saint Pope John
Paul II), Ocena Moliwoci Zbudowania Etyki
Chrzecijaskiej Przy Zaoeniach Systemu
Maksa Schelera (Evaluation of the Possibility of
Constructing a Christian Ethics on the Basis of
Max Schelers System) (Polish) (Vatican City:
Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1980).
16. Bashabi Fraser, Tartan and Turban (Edinburgh:
Luath, 2004), 44. This book should be taught
as part of new literature in English at the graduate level.
17. See Life, 31.
18. In classrooms across the world today Romanticism is decried. But that is the main and only
worthy mode of poetry and even, all literature.
The last Romantic is not Yeats but Fraser now.
The title will hopefully shift. There is nothing
other than Romanticism in poetry. Students of
English literature need to understand that Modernist poets like T S Eliot and W H Auden and
later, Ted Hughes are all negotiating Romanticism and not what is mistaken as Modernism.
Fraser is not a Modernist in the pejorative sense
of the term. Her experiment with the epic-form
makes her a classicist. But which classicist
worth ones mettle is not a Romantic? Thomas
Carlyle (17951881) too was a Romantic. Just
because someone happens to be categorised as
a sturdy Victorian does not mean that she or he
escapes the influence of the Romantics.
19. See A K Ramanujan, Three Hundred

Rmyaas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts
on Translation in Many Rmyaas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, ed.
Paula Richman (Berkeley: University of California, 1991), 2249.
20. This is another term which is used without
much thought. Diaspora is a specifically biblical term which leads to Parousia. The global culture brigade forgets that most people of Indian
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Vedanta and Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary Indian Poetry

origin in the First World will never return to
any promised homeland. So this author asks
the discerning studentestablished self-proclaimed literature gate-keepers are mostly beyond help!to interrogate the term diaspora
using biblical scholarship and not books written
by the likes of the ancient Padmini Mongia.
21. See I A Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study
of Literary Judgment (London: Kegan Paul,
Trench and Trubner, 1930).
22. See William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) <http://www.bartleby.
com/39/36.html> accessed 10 August 2016.
23. Quickening of our hearts is a trope in poetry.
Medieval English literature stresses this trope.
Fraser quickens our hearts.
24. See A K Ramanujan, A River.
25. Literature students have to be very careful that
while studying they do not fall for fads: isms,
which will fade once some or the other eminent
teacher retires! For example, once linguistics
was the staple of many English literature departments because someone in the department
had a bias to that field. But linguistics has little
to do with untameable literature or fat studies.
This author once heard an overweight literature
professor lecture on fat studies!
26. Being a successful feminist cannot be reason
enough to be considered a great poet. The late
Mahashveta Devi (19262016) was famous not
for being a social reformer or for running nongovernmental organisations. She was a great
word-artist and therefore people noticed her
social work. Not the other way around. Frasers feminism will be remembered because she
is a great poet, not because she is a feminist
thinker. Who is a greater feminist: Charlotte
Bront (181655) or Toril Moi (b. 1953)? Outside of hallowed social sciences departments
few have heard of Moi!
27. Entrapping Light, Life, 7.
28. As I am Carried from Edinburgh to London in
Tartan and Turban, 88.
29. See Life, 51.
30. The influence of John Keatss La Belle Dame
Sans Merci is evident here. Keats was influenced
by Vedanta through the German Idealists and
the chimera that is the lady without gratitude
or mercy is the true nature of samsara.
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31. See Life, 234.

32. Building the Bodyline, Ragas and Reels, 75.
33. See Bashabi Fraser, Rabindranath Tagores
Global Vision, Literature Compass, 12/5 (May
2015), 16172.
34. See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization:
A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New
York: Vintage, 1961).
35. See Medical Aid for Palestine in Bashabi Fraser,
Letters to My Mother and Other Mothers (Edinburgh: Luath, 2015), 489. Frasers poetry is
in the best Vedantic tradition: Vasudhaiva kutumbakam; the world is one family. Sri Ramakrishna would have been happy with Fraser.
36. See Life, 33.
37. See Bashabi Fraser, From the Ganga to the Tay: A
Poetic Conversation between the Ganges and the
TayAn Epic Poem (Edinburgh: Luath, 2009).
Excerpts from this book should be compulsory
reading in any masters syllabi in English literature. And the entire book should be compulsory
reading within specialisations, which deal with
neo-epic genres and in courses which offer Indian English poetry at the masters level.
38. See A History of Indian literature in English,
ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (New York:
Columbia University, 2003). He has a stellar
group of scholars writing for him but none
of them showed critical acumen by omitting
Fraser. That may be because this stellar group
sold out to anti-Hindu forces. Frasers alliance with Hinduism will disqualify her from
being included within bombastic poetry discussions. Her Ragas and Reels is replete with
Hindu symbols and has explicit Hindu and
Christian poems. These are enough to enrage
the subaltern attendants, who have taken over
Shimlas Indian Institute for Advanced Studies
and also, centres for academic excellence in
India like the Jawaharlal Nehru University,
New Delhi.
39. See Amit Chaudhuri,The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature (London: Picador, 2001);
and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian
Poets, ed. Jeet Thayil (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2008).
Thayil, as has been mentioned in this article,
should confine himself to writing original stuff
and leave editing to professional critics.
40. See Ragas and Reels, 85.

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